


Making the First Move

by DiNovia



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cat Grant Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl, F/F, Press Secretary Cat Grant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-25 22:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17129831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiNovia/pseuds/DiNovia
Summary: For bathtimefunduck, whose prompt read: Reunion. Person A has been out of town for an extended period of time and Person B doesn't expect them back any time soon. Person A surprises them for Christmas.Cat, overworked in DC and estranged from just about everyone in her life, gets a surprise visitor on Christmas Eve.





	Making the First Move

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bathtimefunduck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bathtimefunduck/gifts).



_And there you have it, folks - Thurgood Marshall airport just canceled all flights making it the latest international airport in the region to do so. Did you all wish for a white Christmas this year or what, because let me tell you, you got it! There's a blizzard warning in effect for our entire viewing area, and that includes parts of Baltimore, so if you're home, stay put, and if you're out, well, try to get somewhere warm soon, okay? Dulles is reporting eleven inches of snow on the ground..._

The television droned on in the background of Cat Grant's Dupont Circle penthouse, declaring Christmas Eve 2018 an official 'Snowmageddon' with blizzard conditions in and around Washington bringing the city and the government to its proverbial knees. Cat wasn't listening. She was waiting for her teenaged son to pick up his damned phone.

 _"Mom?"_ Carter was breathless when he finally answered.  _"Mom, I'm sorry! I was in the pool and Dad was supposed to let me know when you called but he--"_

Cat ground her teeth at the mention of her ex. "It's okay, Carter," she said too sweetly. "I know your father must be busy with his new girlfriend, Charmin--"

 _"Cheyenne,"_ Carter corrected, laughing under his breath. 

"Whatever," said Cat, flicking her wrist dismissively. Her dramatics went unwitnessed in the emptiness of her apartment, though, and Cat felt vaguely silly for indulging the impulse. "I just wanted to talk to you. It's nearly Christmas here and I wanted to say it, say 'Merry Christmas' to you before it was over." She paced to the other side of the room, one arm crossed over her chest. "How's Maui?"

 _"Hot,"_ said Carter.  _"And it's weird to see people surfing in Santa hats and restaurants all decked out with lights and holly and stuff even though it's, like, ninety degrees. I mean, pumpkin pie doesn't even taste right at that temperature!"_

Cat frowned. "You could be here with me," she said, not thinking. "There's a blizzard and its freezing and all the airports are shut down, but at least the pumpkin pie would taste better..."

 _"Mom..."_ Carter didn't say it aloud - that she'd promised not to complain about him wanting to spend some time with his father this Christmas and she couldn't even manage that for two whole minutes - but she heard the chastisement in the slightly elongated vowel of the word. 

"No, no, you're right, Carter," she said, pacing back to the other side of the room. "I'm sorry. I'll be better, okay? When you come back, I promise I'll be better. I won't work a thousand hours a week and we'll schedule time together and--"

_"Mom, have you turned on the tree yet? Did you even put one up?"_

Cat bit the side of her thumbnail and looked at the perfectly lovely artificial Fraser Hill twelve-foot fir in the corner, decorated by the best associates Lord & Taylor had to offer, a perk for all of Olivia's staff. Cat had only turned it on once - when her friend from the WaPo magazine had come to do a style piece on how President Marsdin's wonderfully diverse staff celebrated the holidays.

"I have a tree," she insisted, scoffing, but it looked cold and barren with its lights dark and nothing underneath it.

 _"Turn it on, Mom,"_ said Carter.  _"Play those Christmas albums you used to love in National City - Julie Andrews and Charlie Brown and The Muppet's Christmas Carol--"_

Cat laughed and there was mirth in it, thin like Dickensian gruel. "I think that last one was  _your_ favorite," she said.

 _"It doesn't matter. What matters is that even though you're alone this Christmas, you're not_ alone _alone, you know? I love you, and Adam loves you, and Gramma Katherine loves you, like, in her own way, and, you know, other people love you, too--"_

"You overestimate the number of people in this world who care about me, Carter," said Cat morosely. She didn't add that she wouldn't be surprised if he stopped taking her calls one day in the not-too-distant future. When he hadn't picked up the first time she'd called tonight, she'd thought that day was today.

_"Play the albums. Turn on the Christmas tree. Put out cookies for Santa like we do every year. It will help. I promise."_

Cat shook her head. "You haven't believed in Santa since you were five years old," she accused. "I never understood why we kept on with the charade after that. I don't even _like_ sugar cookies!"

 _"No, but you like bourbon,"_ said Carter, and if he'd said it with a little more acid than usual, what could Cat say? It was true, after all.  _"And we 'kept on' with it because it was ours - something we did together every year, just for us. I didn't need the magic of Santa when my mother was way cooler than he could ever be every other Tuesday!"_ He sighed and tried again.  _"Put them out. Text pictures of them to me. Give me a running commentary on their flakiness or the sugar to butter ratio or how well they baked. Pretend you're Paul Hollywood and sugar cookies are the shittiest thing you've ever tasted - I don't care! It. Will. Help."_

"I don't know," she said, pacing back to the other side of the room. Just the thought of dragging out all those supplies, of expending all that effort. It was too exhausting to contemplate.

 _"Or you could just call her,"_ Carter countered quietly.  _"She'd come; I know she would--"_

"No." The word sounded like the slamming of a door.

_"Mom--"_

"I said no, Carter. Drop it. Right now."

 _"Fine,"_ he snarled, sounding angrier than Cat had ever heard him. _"Waste another year being miserable - letting_ her _be miserable. You only have so many years left compared to her, but then, what do I know?"_ He made a sound like pain and frustration all rolled into a spiky ball.  _"Do whatever you want, Mom. I mean, that's what you're best at, right?"_  

Then the line went dead.

"Carter?" snapped Cat. When she realized he'd hung up on her, she stabbed her phone with her finger, intending to call him back.

She stopped when she finally understood she'd driven him to do it. She threw her phone across the room, enjoying the satisfying thud it made when it hit the wall. After it slid to the floor, she turned her back on it and stalked to the bar cart in the corner of the room, helping herself to a generous three fingers of the bourbon she loved so much. The burn of it fueled her rage.

She poured herself another and raised it to her lips, but the scent of it stopped her in mid-movement. She inhaled slowly, savoring it this time, and something quiet broke through her anger.

The sharp aroma of alcohol gave way to something lighter, something honeyed and spicy and citrusy and altogether familiar. 

Christmas.

Christmas Eve, to be exact - baking for Santa with Carter at her side. Carter at four, at six, at eight, smiling up at her like she was the moon itself. His excited exclamations of "Look, Mommy!" followed by giggles, always giggles. There was usually flour in his hair or icing on his cheek, and they left lumpy, sticky wreaths and trees and snowmen on the fine china next to a tumbler of amber liquid. Carter would print the note - For Santa - in his best handwriting and then scurry off to bed.

Cat returned later, long after Carter was asleep, to taste test each cookie on the plate, ignoring the tiny fingerprints pressed into the royal icing, washing away the cloying sugar-upon-sugar taste of them with clean, crisp bourbon...

She went to the kitchen.

An hour later, she sent Carter several photographs of the results, along with a selfie. Her cheek sported a smudge of artfully-placed flour and the caption she sent along with it said  _I'm no Mary Berry, but these will do, I suppose. I'm sorry for our misunderstanding. I do love you - more than you will ever know. Merry Christmas._

Carter took forever to respond, but when he did, it was two thumbs up emojis and a brief video, shot beachside near a phalanx of empty teal blue beach-loungers. 

 _"I'm sorry, too, Mom. I shouldn't have pushed."_ He looked off camera at the sound of a girl's laughter and waved, smiling.  _"I'll be right there!"_ he called.  _"I'm talking to my Mom!"_ When he looked back at the camera, he smiled at her, too, and it made Cat feel a thousand times lighter.  _"The cookies look great - lots better than I ever made,"_ he said.  _"Santa will love them for sure."_ Someone called for him off camera and he yelled,  _"I'm coming! Wait for me!"_ When he looked back at the camera, though, Cat thought he'd aged five years in just that moment, leapfrogging from fifteen to twenty, from teenager to young man in one fell swoop.  _"I love you, too, Mom,"_ he said. _"Merry Christmas."_  

Cat watched the video twice more before pressing the phone to her heart. Sighing, she made her way to the music bar and pressed a few buttons to activate it, scrolling through several menus before she found the playlist she wanted.

Julie Andrews'  _Sleigh Ride_ filled the room and Cat crossed to the tree in the corner to turn it on, stepping back to admire it now that it was lit, blue and ivory and white lights blinking in serene harmony. After a moment, she brought a plate of her now-cooled mitten and Santa's boot cookies from the kitchen, leaving them on the coffee table with a Post-it that said "For Santa" in her neat printing.

Cat put her glass of bourbon next to the plate and snapped a pic, texting it to Carter with the caption _And to all, a good night_. Then she retrieved her glass and walked to the windows overlooking her balcony. She pushed aside one of the luxurious thermal curtains she'd had put up for the winter and looked out at the snow. It was still coming down, a wall of white so intense she could barely see the lights of the buildings around her. Everything was fog and glitter and blankets of white as far as the eye could see and Cat, ever fastidious, appreciated how clean it all seemed most of all.

Mariah Carey's uplifting Christmas lament  _All I Want for Christmas is You_  began to play just as she took another sip of bourbon.

Cat closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. Tears she refused to shed gave the view outside a kind of kaleidoscopic magic, refracting light in shards and shapes wondrous to behold.

"Merry Christmas, Kara," she whispered, lifting her glass in a half-hearted toast. Then she downed the remainder of her drink, left the empty glass next to the cookies in the great room, switched off the music and all the lights - save the tree - and went to bed.

\---

Something woke Cat in the night, but as she pushed herself upright in the bed, she couldn't think what it was. A sound, perhaps. 

She glanced into the hallway, listening closely, cataloging every move she'd made before going to bed. The glow of the tree she'd left on was still visible, which was a good sign, and she knew the doors were locked. Even if they weren't, this building - home to mostly high-level White House staff and their families - was a veritable fortress. No one who wasn't implicitly welcome should be able to get in.

The soft sound of Christmas carols in the background finally convinced Cat to get up. Hadn't she turned off the music bar when she'd gone to bed?

She slipped into her robe and padded silently down the hall into the great room, her bare feet hardly making a dent in the plush carpeting. Everything was just where she'd left it, right down to the plate of--

The cookies. 

The cookies were gone.

The cookies were gone and sitting beside the empty plate was an abandoned red hat with distinctive white trim.

What. The. Fuck.

Before the implications of that could really sink in, Cat heard something in the kitchen, a muted crunching sound not unlike--

Cat flew into the darkened room and threw on the lights.

"Just who the hell do you think you--" she began, only to stop dead when her brain finally processed the scene in front of her. Red boots. A red cape. Long, golden curls wet from the snow. The methodical disappearance of the rest of her cookies.

"Kara?" she asked quietly.

Kara sighed, her shoulders hunching on the exhale. She'd frozen when the lights had gone on, but now she turned around slowly, guiltily, regret and something else - something unidentifiable - in her eyes. She swallowed her last bite of holiday cheer and wiped the crumbs from her lips.

"Miss Grant," she said, lifting her chin in defiance.

"What are you doing here?" breathed Cat, not understanding. "How did you...?" She glanced out the kitchen window as if to assure herself the blizzard was still there, that it wasn't some alcohol-fueled nightmare meant to accentuate just how trapped she felt, everywhere and everywhen. 

Kara followed Cat's gaze and grinned. "Blizzards can't stop me, Miss Grant. Red-nosed reindeer or not." Then she sobered, becoming Supergirl in an instant, changing her stance to one of military 'at ease.' "I'm here at the request of a friend," she said. She shot a disapproving look at Cat. "He was worried about you."

"Carter?" asked Cat, and Kara nodded precisely once.

"He refused my gift, said he didn't want anything this year. He said he needed me to do something for him instead, that he needed me to come here. So I came."

Cat had not risen through the ranks of journalistic expertise to wear a crown as Queen of All Media without honing considerable skills in reading body language and the words people often left unsaid.

"But you didn't want to, did you?"

Kara's chin lifted again, then she deflated and shook her head.

"Why not?" asked Cat.

Kara glared at Cat for a split second, then trained her gaze on a spot three feet in front of her nose.

"You left National City," she said flatly. "You cut ties. I thought you'd made yourself pretty clear."

Cat tilted her head in acknowledgment of the truth of those words. She had done exactly that - cut ties. As cleanly and as completely as possible. 

"Do you know why?" she asked.

The question upset Kara, made her frown. "To 'dive,'" she said, spitting the word  _dive_ as if it was something obscene.

Cat shook her head. "No," she said. "Not to dive. That was a convenient lie." She pulled the tie on her robe tighter to give her hands something to do. God, she wanted a drink. Why were confessions such thirsty work? "I left National City to save myself. Because I was drowning."

That got Kara's attention, transmuting her frown of rage into one of confusion just like that. She looked at Cat standing stiff and uncomfortable before her and knew she was telling the truth. An awful, crushing truth.

"Drowning how?" she asked. "Why didn't you ask me for help?" She took a step toward Cat, looking for all the world like she wanted to wrap the smaller woman up in her arms, like she wanted to shelter her from all the hurt and pain in the world, but she stopped herself, suddenly, awkwardly, and squeezed her hands into fists. "I would have helped you, Miss Grant," she said, choking on the whispered words, blue eyes filling with tears. "I would have done  _anything_ for you."

"Anything, apparently, except make the first move."

Bombs made sounds, thought Kara helplessly. Bombs exploded or detonated or thundered.

Not this bomb, though. No, this bomb unfolded, expanded, ballooned. This bomb pushed silence into every crack and crevice until the walls seethed with it. 

"Excuse me?" she asked eventually. Her words were barely words at all - more absent than present.

Cat's eyes flashed dangerously. "Don't act surprised, Kara," she warned. "You knew what I wanted. What I needed. You  _knew_ and you did nothing. Day after day, year after year. Until the hours themselves ran red with what was left of the good years of my life." She looked away from Kara then, adding softly, "Until I was in danger of having nothing worthwhile left to give."

" _That's_ what you wanted from me?" cried Kara, bitter tears spilling down her cheeks. "For _me_ to make the first move?"

Cat jeered, incredulous. "Well you certainly didn't expect me to do it, did you? With empires falling all around us, brought down daily by #metoo and abandoned non-disclosure agreements? I had a legacy to protect!"

Kara laughed but it was hollow and dismissive. "A legacy? What if I had been wrong, Cat? What if I had approached you and I was wrong? What if you didn't want me? You were protecting a legacy, Cat, but I was protecting my  _heart!"_ She spun away, cape snapping. Hugging herself tightly, Kara gulped back frustrated sobs until they finally overwhelmed her and she thought _'fuck it'_ and just let the tears come. 

Now it was Cat's turn to be confounded. "But..." She looked at Kara shuddering in the middle of her kitchen and shook her head, suddenly at a loss. "Surely you must have known," she whispered. "I did everything I could... I even taught you what to look for..."

Kara calmed herself as best she could but she didn't turn around. "When?" she asked quietly.

"When I showed you my article," said Cat. "'The Lighthouse Technique.'"

Kara glanced over her shoulder. "Fat lot of good  _that_ did," she muttered. "I did everything it said to do but it only ever seemed to work on Winn."

Cat blinked at Kara, stunned. "Kara, I didn't show you that article so _you_ would do what it said to do."

Kara wiped her nose on her sleeve grumpily. "You didn't?"

"Oh, darling..." Cat walked up behind Kara and gently placed her hand on her back, holding it there even when Kara stiffened under her touch, waiting patiently until she finally relaxed and pressed back into it. "I showed it to you so you'd recognize what  _I_ was doing," she said.

Kara turned around, eyes wide over the hands covering her mouth. "Both of us were...?" 

Cat smirked. "Two lighthouses, no boats," she confirmed, chuckling ruefully. 

Kara laughed in spite of herself. When silence enveloped them again, Kara pulled her hands away from her face and looked at her feet.

"Is it too late?" she asked. "For me to make the first move, I mean?"

Cat stepped into Kara's personal space and crooked her index finger under that once-defiant chin, lifting it so she could look into Kara's oceanic eyes. "I think coming here tonight of all nights - in a blizzard, no less - counts," she said, smiling softly. "Don't you?"

"I was hoping," said Kara, smiling back. "So that means the second move is...?"

"No more talk of moves," growled Cat, snaking her hand around the back of Kara's neck and pulling her down into an electric, long-overdue kiss. When she finally pulled away, breathless and wanting more, she looked up at Kara with ardent eyes. "If it's okay with SuperSanta, I'd much prefer to unwrap my present now."

Kara nodded briskly and bit her lip when Cat took her hand, leading her through the penthouse toward the master suite.

"And later - much, much later," continued Cat, "perhaps you'll remind me to write an update to my article."

"An update?" asked Kara.

"Specifically for female couples, entitled 'The Lighthouse Technique: Remember, One of You Has to Be the Boat or No One Gets Wet.'"

_fin_


End file.
